Abstract

KLEINSCHMIDT, Jochen. Drones and the International Legal Order. Technology, Strategy, and Long Chains of Action. colomb.int. [online]. 2015, n.84, pp.17-42. ISSN 0121-5612.  https://doi.org/10.7440/colombiaint84.2015.01.

The main thesis of this article is that the increasing recourse to the use of unmanned aerial systems in asymmetric warfare and the beginning routinization of U.S. drone operations represent part of an evolutionary change in the spatial ordering of global politics. Using a heuristic framework based on actor-network theory, it is argued that practices of panoptic observation and selective airstrikes, being in need of legal justification, contribute to a reterritorialization of asymmetric conflicts. Under a new normative spatial regime, a legal condition of state immaturity is constructed, which establishes a zone of conditional sovereignty subject to transnational aerial policing. At the same time, this process is neither a deterministic result of the new technology nor a deliberate effect of policies to which drones are merely neutral instruments. Rather, military technology and political decisions both form part of a long chain of action which has evolved under the specific circumstances of recent military interventions.

Keywords : Drones; actor-network; international law; technology; strategy; asymmetric conflict; political geography.

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